Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We have been told that Wexford will have an operational satellite dialysis unit in July 2016. Four years of delays in implementing this have led to significant disappointment in Wexford. As the Tánaiste may know, the Health Service Executive, HSE, intended to have such a service operational in Wexford by 2012. However, we were told this was not achievable due to a legal challenge by private dialysis providers to the tender award for the contracted satellite services in Dublin. A company called Fresenius Medical Care (Ireland) Limited, part of a €20 billion corporation, secured an injunction restraining the HSE from awarding the contract to another company, Beacon Medical Group. The dispute concerned the contract in Dublin but has impacted strongly on Wexford with a two and a half year legal battle and a four-year delay.

Meanwhile, 39 Wexford dialysis patients have to be taxied from Wexford to Waterford three times a week. When I queried the costs of this with the HSE, it informed me it costs €38,330 a month to taxi the 39 patients back and forth, €460,000 a year. Worse still is the incalculable cost to the well-being of the dialysis patients affected. The majority of these patients are in their 60s. I spoke to one of them recently, a man who is almost 80. He spends 400 hours a year, that is 50 eight-hour days, just travelling in a minibus from his home in Wexford to Waterford Regional Hospital for dialysis. His daughter Bernie told me her dad is collected at 10.30 in the morning, home usually at 7 p.m. with a five-hour dialysis session in between, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This journey in a minibus in the cold and wet is tough for any individual. For many of Wexford's elderly, it amounts to abuse.

As the promised Wexford service was private rather than public, it has been held up by this injunction. There is something seriously wrong with the idea that a private company's action in court can have such an impact on the provision of a vital health service in Wexford. Does the Tánaiste believe this is good enough?

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